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On June 3, Tempest published an article entitled Solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance! by Ashley Smith, a prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and former leader of the now-defunct International Socialist Organization (ISO).

The article calls for arming Ukraine with heavy NATO weapons and is a tirade against all who question the propaganda of US imperialism. It justifies US escalation by claiming the Ukrainian people are engaged in a democratic struggle for self-determination against Russian imperialism.

Smiths article is an attempt to preempt opposition within the milieu of the Democratic Socialists of America to the prolonged US/NATO-led war, which has provoked widespread shortages of basic necessities all over the world and risks plunging the globe into a nuclear nightmare. As Smith says in a brief preface, the article aims to review the ongoing Left debates about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the continuing need to defend Ukrainian resistance as the starting point for rebuilding international solidarity from below.

In his article, Smith declares that the international Left now more than ever must organize solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance and defend its right to secure arms. Smith argues that the Ukrainian military has waged a national popular struggle for self-determination, a fundamentally democratic aim and one that deserves the full support of the international left.

There can be no talk of NATO expansion, which Smith claims is merely Putins alibi, because the states of Eastern Europe only joined NATO out of longtime fear of their imperial overlord, Russia. The crux of Smiths argument is that the war is one of popular working class resistance to Russia. In this vein, Smith attacks Faux anti-imperialists who oppose arming the so-called Ukrainian resistance and thereby betray Ukraine.

These are not serious theoretical arguments, they are absurdities. Smith makes no attempt to explain how Ukraines attempt to join NATO, a military network run by the worlds largest imperialist powers, constitutes a step toward self-determination, nor can he explain why pro-Russian separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk cannot assert the same right to leave Ukraine. He praises the Ukrainian left for fighting the governments oligarchic capitalism, but he cannot explain how it is that this same government is leading a struggle against imperialism. The subject of the Ukrainian regimes glorification of Stepan Banderathe leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which participated in the mass extermination of Jews during World War IIis all but ignored.

Smiths targets are not those who openly defend Russia, but rather parties and individuals that might criticize Russia but blame the US and NATO for the conflict and thereby justify Russias war. Even worse, Smith writes, they back actions like strikes by workers to block arms shipments to Ukraine. He attacks those who condemn Russias invasion but also oppose Ukraines military resistance as well as US and NATO arms shipments in support of it.

Smith often uses this type of provocative language to justify US intervention. In 2016, for example, he advocated US imperialist support for the so-called democratic opposition in Syria by writing: The Syrian Revolution has tested the left internationally by posing a blunt question: Which side are you on? Do you support the popular struggle against dictatorship and for democracy? Or are you with Bashar al-Assads brutal regime, his imperial backer Russia, his regional ally Iran and Irans proxies like Hezbollah from Lebanon?

In his article on the Ukrainian resistance, Smith denounces pacifists who oppose Ukraines right to secure arms and the arms shipments themselves, instead calling for the US to broker a ceasefire, engage in diplomacy, and secure a negotiated settlement. This, Smith says, is an attack on Ukraines right to self-determination. Since Ukraines government and its people have made clear that they remain committed to resisting Russian occupation, the left must demand the bloody war be dragged out until all Ukrainian territory is taken from Russian control.

To the extent that Smith criticizes American and European imperialism at all, it is to claim they are insufficiently bellicose against Russia. Smith worries that a growing chorus in the elite, most notably in western Europe, is actually calling for a ceasefire which would betray Ukraines struggle. The proponents of such pacifism include multinational capital and the corporate media and political class in the US and Europe.

Calling the Biden administration hypersensitive to such pressure from its European allies, Smith warns there is a real danger that Western imperialism could force Ukraine into a rotten deal that ratifies the Russian partition of the country. In other words, Smiths position is to the right of finance capital and the Biden administration. On this basis he proposes: Now more than ever we should build solidarity with Ukraines resistance and defend its right to secure arms including from the US and NATO to free itself from Russian occupation.

It is politically revealing that Smith writes of the need to correct the distortions made by some sections of the Left about the nature of this war: it is one of imperialist aggression by Russia to re-impose its rule over its oldest former colony, Ukraine.

The claim that Ukraine is a colony of Russian imperialism is an intentional historical sleight of hand. It bypasses the Russian Revolution of 1917, which overthrew the Tsarist regime and ended the bloody struggle of German and Russian imperialism for control over Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe in the First World War. The Bolsheviks overturned the imperial-colonial relationship and, in the pre-Stalin period, sought to counteract the influence of Great Russian chauvinism and to facilitate the political unification of the workers of Ukraine and Russia.

But Smith has no concern for making an appraisal of the actual social forces involved in this conflict. His reference to Ukraine as Russias oldest former colony is an attempt to equate the brutal tsarist colonial subjugation of Ukraine with the Soviet Unions policy toward the country, and to thereby present the Soviet Union as an imperialist power which did not represent a progressive development from the tsarist regime that preceded it.

In a separate article, Smith attacked critics of US imperialisms war aims against Russia for practicing what he called abstract morality. To those who believe that the historic record of American imperialisms wars give reason to doubt its humanitarian pretenses, Smith wrote: In place of abstract morality, which can lead to a frankly immoral position of neutrality in the struggle between oppressors and oppressed, we should approach the question of violence and war politically and as a tactical question. We should oppose wars that enforce domination, oppression, and exploitation, and support wars that free people from those structures.

To Marxists, the struggle against imperialism and imperialist violence and oppression is not a tactical question, it is a principled strategic question upon which the fate of the revolution depends. Whether a state is imperialist or oppressed is not an abstract moral label, it is a historical-sociological determination with concrete political consequences. Here, Smith references abstract morality only as a means to justify the death and destruction wrought by US imperialism and to hide behind the fig leaf of the so-called Ukrainian resistance to the Russian empire, and he cannot claim the moral high ground when his own position corresponds with that of a government dripping with blood from 30 years of permanent war in North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.

Smiths presentation of Ukraine as a victim of longstanding Russian imperialism echoes the argument of 20th century anti-communists who argued that the Soviet Union was an imperialist state and that non-Russian republics of the USSR were captive states in the imperial Soviet empire. The term captive states was promoted by the National Captive Nations Committee, a far-right group whose chairman, Yaroslav Stetsko, was a Nazi collaborator who led the OUN after Banderas death. The group changed its name to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in 1993.

This is not an accidental correspondence of views. Smith belongs to the tradition of Shachtmanism, which is rooted in pro-imperialist anti-communism.

The DSA and its predecessor organization (the Democratic Socialist Organizing CommitteeDSOC) emerged out of a political tendency led by Max Shachtman, who had joined the communist movement in 1923 and co-founded the American section of the Trotskyist Left Opposition with James P. Cannon when Trotskyists were expelled by the Stalinists in 1928.

Shachtman split from the Trotskyist movement in the United States at the onset of the Second World War in 1939-40 and moved far from the socialist traditions he had once defended. He argued that the Stalinist bureaucracy was a new ruling class and put forward the position that socialists must support democratic American imperialism in the Cold War against authoritarian Russia.

On this basis, Shachtman supported the Korean War, the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the Vietnam War, and became an adviser to the AFL-CIO. His political progeny, including figures like Tom Kahn, became deeply embedded in the AFL-CIOs activity on behalf of American imperialism through the American Institute for Free Labor Development. This organization, which was the predecessor to todays Solidarity Center, was a critical mechanism through which US imperialism has manipulated elections, organized coups and suppressed the class struggle on a world scale for decades.

Another of Shachtmans apprentices, DSOC founder Michael Harrington, brought the anti-communist essence of Shachtmans politics into the movement against the war in Vietnam and then into the foundation of DSOC and the DSA. Historian Todd Gitlin said, Anti-Communism was Harringtons emotional touchstone, which he had acquired with the brilliant and bitter Max Shachtman. Harringtons principle was that the left must, as he put it, play a pro-American, Cold War, State Department kind of role.

For decades, the DSA has functioned as a faction within the Democratic Party. After years of isolation, the DSA benefited from its identification with Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign to acquire tens of thousands of paper members in a relatively short period of time. Sanders, with the support of the DSA, almost won the Democratic Partys nomination against Hillary Clinton that year, to the shock of the entire political establishment, including Sanders himself.

In 2018, DSA member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won a primary election against top House Democrat Joe Crowley, and the DSA witnessed another influx of new members, largely young people who supported the organization because they believed it to be anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist.

But the DSA is not a vehicle for opposing capitalism and war, it is a catchment area for the political establishment, where social opposition is to be trapped and neutralized within the Democratic Party. That is the role it has played for decades, in which it has functioned as a loyal faction of the Democratic Party.

In particular, the historical role of the DSA has been to disorient anti-war sentiment, color American imperialisms foreign policy objectives as left-wing or democratic, and facilitate the global machinations of the US war machine.

But the fight for socialism is incompatible with support for US imperialism, and the DSA is not a socialist organization. Like the viciously pro-war Green parties in Europe, its social base is a section of the affluent upper-middle class which forms a key social constituency for imperialist war against Russia. The political actions of the DSAs elected officials reflect its class character. In mid-May the DSAs entire congressional slate (including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, Ilhan Omar and Bernie Sanders) voted for the Biden administrations $40 billion Ukraine military aid bill.

In the spring of 2019, the International Socialist Organization (which also belongs to the Shachtmanite tradition but remained separate from the DSA for decades) dissolved itself almost overnight. The pretense for the dissolution was an allegation of sexual assault by one member against another from six years earlier, but the real reason was the leaderships recognition that they could best fulfill their political aims within the broader radicalized milieu of the DSA, with whom they shared common roots. After the organizations leaders successfully disentangled the highly profitable book publishing company Haymarket Books from the organization, the ISO voted to dissolve itself and the bulk of its members promptly joined the DSA.

While in the ISO, Smith had been one of the organizations chief writers on foreign policy, consistently promoting various US-backed color movements, including in Syria, where Smith repeatedly presented the CIA-funded democratic forces as a popular resistance and denounced opponents of US intervention.

When Smith and other ISO leaders joined the DSA, their primary responsibility was to ensure that the anti-imperialist aspirations of the newly radicalized membership did not develop as a challenge to the pro-imperialist political essence of the DSA, which over its entire existence has functioned as a faction within the imperialist Democratic Party.

To this end, the ex-ISO members founded the Tempest Collective in 2020. Tempest Collective publishes Tempest magazine, the DSA-affiliated publication in which Smiths June 3 article on Ukraine appeared. Over 35 contributors to Tempest (the overwhelming majority of its total writers) are former members of the ISO and/or former contributors to its publications, Socialist Worker and the International Socialist Review.

Smith is also the publication manager for Spectre, a journal focusing on foreign policy and identity politics, whose editorial board includes a number of former ISO leaders, including Charles Post, David McNally, Tithi Bhattacharya and Shireen Akram-Boshar.

The title of Smiths articleSolidarity with the Ukrainian resistance!announces a new stage in the pro-war propaganda campaign. It is the hallmark of Shachtmanism to present a left face on American imperialisms wars. In this tradition, Smith and other proponents of war are inventing a Ukrainian resistance to present the war as an anti-colonial struggle by the Ukrainian people.

The model of the so-called resistance is an organization that was totally unknown before the outbreak of the war: Sotsialnyi Rukh.

Sotsialnyi Rukh has played a key role in creating an international network for war against Russia. It has hosted international gatherings advocating war, including one in Lvov on May 5-6 that was attended by representatives of the Polish party Razem, the French New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) and the Argentinian Morenoite Left Front-Workers Unity, as well as delegations from British trade unions. According to a statement posted by Sotsialnyi Rukh after the May gathering, all delegates called for armed support of Ukraine and strict sanctions. Some of them directly influence the making of these decisions by their own governments.

Since Russias invasion of Ukraine, Sotsialnyi Rukhs leaders have given a flood of interviews to international left publications to promote war and advocate the delivery of NATO weapons to Ukraine. During media appearances, Sotsialnyi Rukh leaders stick to the same script, consistently parroting US imperialisms claim that the war is a national liberation struggle and that the left must support weapons shipments. A common feature of these interviews is vicious denunciations of Western leftists who oppose US/NATO escalation and who claim the war is anything but a war for national liberation.

Some examples include the following:

On February 25, the day after Russia invaded Ukraine, Sotsialnyi Rukh leader Taras Bilous, who is also editor of a Sotsialnyi Rukh-aligned journal, Commons, published a widely-circulated document on OpenDemocracy.net titled A letter to the Western Left from Kiev. The article denounces those opposing US military aid as imagining NATO aggression in Ukraine and practicing the anti-imperialism of idiots. He states his opposition to those who exaggerated the influence of the far-right in Ukraine, adding: Part of the responsibility for what is happening rests with you.

The letter quotes Leila Al-Shami, a British intellectual and writer for the ISOs International Socialist Review who denounced the World Socialist Web Site as so-called leftists in 2018 for our opposition to US imperialisms war in Syria. Bilous praises Al-Shami for attacking socialists who argue that the main enemy is at home. He concludes: There will be no compromise. Putin can plan whatever he wants the struggle will last until Russia gets out of Ukraine and pays for all the victims and the destruction.

On April 3, ex-ISO member and current DSA member Todd Chretien moderated a DSA panel featuring Sotsialnyi Rukh leader Vladyslav Starodubstev, who declared that the war creates the possibility for a push of socialist ideas in Ukraine. Starodubstev said the Ukrainian military is comprised of socialists who need weapons to fight the Russians and thereby win others to socialism.

On April 8, International Viewpoint published an interview with Sotsialnyi Rukh Chairman Vitaly Dudin, who said that socialists are joining the Ukrainian military and need weapons: Some Social Movement activists, as well as many trade unions members, have joined the Ukrainian Territorial Defence as volunteers, and a lot of leftists are helping as volunteers to supply the army. Dudin criticized NATO: We believe NATO has played the role of a passive spectator in this war. Starting from the end of 2021, they have done nothing to support Ukraine with arms, he said.

On May 10, Haymarket Books hosted a panel with Commons co-editor Oksana Dutchak and Yuliya Yurchenko titled How Can Feminist Solidarity help Ukraine? which presented war and weapons shipments as necessary to protect Ukrainian women.

On May 30, Spectre hosted a Facebook event titled Spectre presents: Ukraine, imperialism and the world economy, in which all the panelists attacked opponents of the US imperialist war in Ukraine. The event featured Zakhar Popovych, a member of Sotsialnyi Rukh, who declared that he was very disappointed by those on the left who criticize Russia but who also insist that US government is escalating the war for its own imperialist aims.

Popovych said, For me, if we are opposing this global system of imperialism, of big powers suppressing other peoples of the world, we should support the national liberation of Ukraine, which he called an anti-imperialist fight. For me this is the first step to challenge the system of imperialism.

On April 13, Ashley Smith published an interview in Spectre with Ukrainian political figure Yuliya Yurchenko, who is also associated with Sotsialnyi Rukh, asking her the loaded question, Why is it inaccurate to reduce the war to a conflict between the US/NATO and Russia? How does this ignore the struggle for national liberation?

Yurchenko replied, Reducing this war to conflict between the West and Russia overlooks Ukraine and treats it as a mere pawn between powers. She compared the struggle of the Ukrainian military to the national liberation struggles in Africa and elsewhere, adding, Anti-colonial thinkers and leaders taught us to give voice to them and their struggle. Ukraine is in a similar struggle.

Smith asked Yurchenko, There is a significant debate in the international left about what position to take on the war and what demands to raise. What do you argue we should do? She replied, Again, the international left must put its decolonial hat on in thinking about Ukraine. We are fighting Russia, our historic imperial oppressor. I think some people still get their vision clouded by a one-dimensional opposition to US imperialism alone. But the US is not the aggressor in this situation, Russia is.

She concluded, The international left must be in solidarity with Ukraine as an oppressed nation and our fight for self-determination. That includes our right to secure arms for our fighters and volunteers to win our freedom.

Smith introduced Yurchenko as an author and left-wing academic. But he did not mention that this representative of Ukraines fight for self-determination is also a fellow at the pro-imperialist George Kennan Institute at Princetons Wilson Center, which is funded by the US Congress. The Wilson Centers advisory council includes General David Petraeus, the Embassy of Qatar, and representatives of BP, Citi Bank, Goldman Sachs and other major corporations. Yurchenkos byline also appears in Jacobin magazine.

At the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when the globalized character of world production exposed the bankruptcy of the Stalinist program of socialism in one country, the International Committee of the Fourth International addressed the imperialist powers appropriation of the slogan of national self-determination as a method for justifying imperialist carve-ups like that currently undertaken by the US and its European allies in Eastern Europe.

In a 1993 statement Perspectives and Tasks of the ICFI: The Permanent Revolution Today, David North wrote:

Communal, ethnic and chauvinist movements hide behind democratic phraseologythe slogan of self-determination, national liberationwhile they pursue a policy whose economic content is the renewed enslavement of the broad masses by imperialism. They are directed not toward national liberation, in the sense that this term was understood in an earlier historical period, but to wipe out even the limited gains that were previously made by the masses.

Subsequent experiences have proven the correctness of this perspective. In 1990, the Bush administration used the Kuwaiti sheikdoms right to self-determination as an excuse to invade Iraq in the Persian Gulf War. The Clinton administration cited the same right to justify the carve-up of Yugoslavia by referencing first Bosnia and then Kosovo as the basis for bloody wars that pacified the region on behalf of American and European capital at the cost of tens of thousands of lives.

A review of the political background of todays fighters for self-determination reveals that the Ukrainian resistance is in reality an operation set up by US imperialism and its agents.

Most of Sotsialnyi Rukhs political leadership is or was employed by the Ukrainian Center for Social and Labor Research (CSLR), which is publicly documented to have been funded over many years by the CIAs National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The NED is so openly connected to the US intelligence agencies that it is often called the second CIA.

After Russias invasion of Ukraine, the NED deleted records of its past grants to Ukraine, but some documents are accessible using the Wayback Machine. The documents confirm that the Center for Social and Labor Research received a grant for $22,980 in 2014 in order to promote an awareness of fundamental rights and freedoms.

The grant notes that the Center will continue fostering a greater awareness of the freedom of assembly in Ukraine and that as part of a larger national advocacy campaign, the Center will monitor protest activity throughout the country, share the data with campaign activists [and the US intelligence agencies], distribute them through social media, and produce 12 reports.

Information on workers strikes and protests throughout the country were doubtless of high value to the NED (and the CIA), as US government funding for the project continued for several years.

According to the CV of longtime CSLR director Volodymyr Ishchenko, the CSLR was supported by National Endowment for Democracy (in 2011, 2012, 2014, and 2015) and by International Renaissance Foundation (2010, 2011, 2012, 2013) as well as by the Volkswagen Foundation. Ishchenko is the founder of the Center for Society Research, which is also funded by the NED. The International Renaissance Foundation is George Soros main Non-Governmental Organization in Ukraine. Soros has recently called for all-out war against Russia. Ishchenko has written numerous articles for Jacobin magazine.

Sotsialnyi Rukh leaders who are or were employed by CSLR at the time it received NED grants include:

Sotsialnyi Rukh is also connected to the AFL-CIOs Solidarity Center, an institution so closely linked to the intelligence agencies that it is referred to in popular parlance as the AFL-CIA. The Solidarity Center forms part of the NED.

In 2015, Dudin and Pilash co-authored a CSLR report detailing a conference during which Pilash shared the stage with Tristan Masat, the coordinator of Solidarity Centers programs in Ukraine.

Dudin and Pilash write that Masat (whom they acknowledge as a representative of Solidarity Center) advised the representatives of unions and NGOs present at the conference to develop membership-based organizations for mass mobilization (particularly the campaign against the new labor law).

This article was also posted on Commons. Contemporaneous social media posts show Sotsialnyi Rukh took Masats advice seriously and made the campaign against the proposed labor law a central political focus.

By Sotsialnyi Rukhs own admission, its membership consists mostly of individuals recruited out of the Ukrainian trade unions that are dominated by Solidarity Center.

A 2021 report published by the CIA-linked USAID, titled External Evaluation of the Global Labor Program, gushes over the role of the Solidarity Center in Ukraine. The US government has developed very close ties with the Ukrainian Confederation of Free Trade Unions (KVPU) and the Independent Union of Miners of Ukraine (NPGU), organizations founded as a protest against the existing old post-USSR union, the report explains.

A 2019 statement Sotsialnyi Rukh: Who we are states: Most of us are involved in independent trade union movement, including the Independent Trade Union of Miners (NPGU), the Free Trade Union of Railway Workers (parts of the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of UkraineKVPU), and some militant factions of Federation of Trade Unions (FPU). In a November 2018 Facebook post by Sotsialnyi Rukh that was shared by current Sotsialnyi Rukh Chairman Vitaly Dudin, Dudin is referred to as the NPGU headquarters representative.

In 2014, Solidarity Center established Labor Initiatives, a national program in Ukraine aimed at training and recruiting Ukrainian activists. According to the 2021 USAID report, a significant expansion of Labor Initiatives started in 2015, which also led to an increase in staff members.

This corresponds to the founding of Sotsialnyi Rukh, which, according to the partys Who are we statement, grew out of the 2013-14 Maidan protests.

According to USAID, Labor Initiatives and Solidarity Center began to hold three annual intensive youth leadership trainings, known as summer school, which include both trade unions and allied community advocates that provide extensive one-on-one and small group mentoring with young worker leaders. The report explained that the summer schools led to the successful recruitment of many pro-US activists: Many activists who attended summer schools as rank-and-file participants now have positions at different levels of both the KVPU and FPU Union structures, the organizations which Sotsialnyi Rukh says most of its membership came out of.

The connection between Solidarity Center and Sotsialnyi Rukh is not a secret. In 2021, the Sotsialnyi Rukh-aligned Ukraine Solidarity Campaign published an article by Inna Kudinska and George Sandul, who run Solidarity Centers Labor Initiatives. The article was originally published on the website of the Solidarity Centers program and was simply reposted by the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign with a link to the AFL-CIO page.

Sotsyalyni Rukh also regularly promotes NPGU miners union president Mykhailo Volynets, who is a self-acknowledged US government asset. Volynets was awarded the AFL-CIO George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award for his support in the US-backed Orange Revolution that took place in Ukraine in 2004. In one 2015 article, Sotsyalyni Rukh featured Volynets marking May Day by laying flowers at the monument to Ukraines revolutionary national poet, Taras Shevchenko.

According to a March 2022 report by Covert Action Magazine, Volynets was photographed meeting with fascist Azov Battalion leader Ihor The Suffocator Kniazhanksy and attended a meeting in 2014 with American Federation of Teachers president and National Endowment for Democracy executive board member Randi Weingarten. Volynets is quoted in a 2005 Radio Free Europe article as saying, Our protest movement grew into a workers movement. The Solidarity Center visited us, and soon the leaders of the strike committees became leaders of trade unions.

The 2021 USAID report on the activity of Solidarity Center in Ukraine also states that the US government is working with the German government to develop grassroots forces on the ground in Ukraine: The SC [Solidarity Center] program is designed to work with direct beneficiaries, who are primarily independent trade unions of Ukraine. SC also engages to varying extents with civil society organizations, the ILO Office in Kyiv, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES), the Ukrainian Parliament and other foreign and local institutions present in Ukraine.

Volynets was also a special invited guest at the AFL-CIOs 2022 convention in Philadelphia.

Taras Bilous, a leader of Sotsialnyi Rukh and editor of its associated publication, Commons, has played a central role in the international campaign for war in Ukraine. Bilous deserves special attention because his February 25 article Letter to the Western Left from Kiev set the tone for the international campaign against left-wing opposition to imperialist war.He regularly comments on Ashley Smiths personal Facebook page, defending Smiths posts.

First, Bilous letter was published on OpenDemocracy.net, whose largest funders are the Soros Open Society Institute and the CIA-linked Ford Foundation. In 2021, OpenDemocracy.net received over 100,000 British pounds from both the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Institute. It is common practice for Sotsialnyi Rukh members to publish articles on OpenDemocracy.net.

In a subsequent Twitter post, Bilous explained that OpenDemocracy.net translated the document and distributed it to a number of international publications on his behalf. Those publications and organizations which re-published Bilous letter or positively referenced it include: International Viewpoint, the Washington DC Democratic Socialists of America, The Anarchist Library, New Politics, Green Left Weekly, Dissent, the International Workers League-Fourth International, The Nation, Workers Liberty, and News and Letters. Ashley Smith was among the first who shared Bilous initial tweet about the letter.

But Bilous is not an authentic representative of the left whose word should be taken seriously by left-wing people internationally. He has close ties with institutions that are funded by the American state.

In February 2016, the NGO New Donbass posted a photograph of Bilous speaking at the Ukrainian House of Free People. That year, New Donbass received several thousand euros from the government of Latvia, a NATO power.

In June 2016, Bilous is photographed attending another event at the House of Free People, and he is depicted in front of a banner that says USAID on it. A 2017 article in USAIDs magazine FrontLines acknowledges the organization was founded with help from USAID.

In November 2018, the OZON Public Monitoring Group posted a photograph of Bilous attending an event at the Center for Civil Liberties. The latter NGOs website states that The OZON Public Monitoring Group is an initiative of the Center for Civil Liberties, which exercises public control over law enforcement agencies, courts and local governments in various regions of Ukraine. In addition, the project reports on protests throughout the country (it monitors freedom of peaceful assembly).

The Center for Civil Liberties is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, the US State Department, the Open Society Institute and the European Commission.

NED documents show that it has given $139,900 worth of grants to the center in the last several years. One NED grant states that the purpose is to engage new activists and convene trainings for those activists.

In December 2018, Bilous and fellow Sotsialnyi Rukh leader Denys Pilash spoke on Hromadske Radio, which is also funded by the NED and received at least one grant (to promote access to independent information and foster democratic discourse).

An article posted on Hromadskes website notes, The guests of the studio are a journalist, a member of the public organization Social Movement Denis Pilash and a historian from the editorial board of the magazine Common Taras Bilous.

In November 2019, Bilous also appeared at a public event held by the IZOLYATSIA Platform for Cultural Initiatives, an organization that was also funded by the NED. According to its website, IZOLYATSIA carries out its work with the support from the National Endowment for Democracy.

In June, following the publication of Smiths article calling for support for the Ukrainian resistance, an unknown group published a statement With the resistance of the Ukrainian people for its victory against the aggression, which begins, As in the days of the Vietnamese peoples liberation struggle, we have always been on the side of the oppressed and aggressed peoples. The article takes up the themes in Smiths June 3 Tempest article and concludes, like Smith does, by calling for arming Ukraine.

The letter was signed by Bilous and fellow Sotsialnyi Rukh leader Vladislav Starodubstev, as well as a series of leading pro-war figures. This list includes Ashley Smith, fellow Spectre editor Charles Post, NewPol editor Dan La Botz, Susan Weissman, Wendy Thompson, Stephen R. Shalom, Simon Pirani, Eric Poulos (nephew of former Stalinist agent Sylvia Ageloff), Gilbert Achcar, Zofia Malisz, Rohini Hensman, Michael Lwy, Olivier Besancenot and many more.

The politically principled opposition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is rooted in a Marxist appraisal of the character of the Russian state in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was carried out with the help of the Stalinist bureaucracy and brought to power an oligarchic capitalist class that is incapable of opposing the imperialist encirclement of the Russian Federation and of the Eurasian landmass as a whole.

The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) opposes Putins invasion, but not by solidarizing ourselves with either the gangsters in Kiev or their puppet-masters in Washington and London. We oppose labeling Russia as imperialist. Such a label rips Russia out of any objective analysis of its position within the world economy and its historical development. It serves only to legitimize American imperialisms longstanding efforts to break up Russia and transform it into a modern colony. The same applies for claims that China is an imperialist power.

The attitude of the International Committee is the polar opposite of the pro-imperialist organizations around the Democratic Party. In a May 17, 2022 statement, we wrote:

Marxists define their attitude toward a given war by analyzing the profound historical and material forces that give rise to it, and which are manifested in the development of the conflict. The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), while opposing the invasion of Ukraine by Russian President Vladimir Putins government, places the current war in the context of a broader Marxist analysis of the entire 20th century, in particular of the historical processes triggered by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the subsequent three decades of imperialist war waged by the US and NATO.

The Marxist position is the position of revolutionary defeatism, in Russia, Ukraine, the United States and every country involved in the war. The May 17 statement explained:

Nearly 90 years ago, Trotsky explained that A socialist who preaches national defense is a petty-bourgeois reactionary at the service of decaying capitalism. The task of Marxists in Ukraine is not to defend their own imperialist-backed national state against Russia in the war, but to advance an internationalist revolutionary perspective based on socialist defeatism to unify and mobilize the Ukrainian, Russian and international working class against the NATO powers, as well as the Kiev and Kremlin regimes.

The Russian Marxists must also base their perspective on socialist defeatism, mobilizing masses of workers and youth against the Putin regime with the demand for an immediate end of the reactionary invasion. The only allies of the Russian workers are their Ukrainian and international class sisters and brothers. This position is an integral part of a single program for the Ukrainian and international working class based on a world socialist revolutionary strategy.

This means building the ICFI in every country and mobilizing the working class for socialist revolution.

WSWS Review

What is the pseudo-left?

This review examines the response of pseudo-left political tendencies internationally to the major world political events of the past decade.

Link:
The Democratic Socialists of America and the invention of the pro-imperialist Ukrainian resistance - WSWS

A Socialist Equality Party (SEP) online public meeting last Sunday reviewed the historic collapse in support for Australias dominant parliamentary parties in the May 21 national elections and the socialist program required to combat the pro-war and social austerity policies now being implemented by the new Labor government.

Attended by over 120 people, the meeting was the only public forum held by any party since the election. Its extended Q&A session, following the main speakers, provided a much-appreciated forum for democratic discussion about the election result and the class battles now unfolding in Australia and internationally.

Senate candidate and SEP assistant national secretary Max Body chaired the meeting, with SEP National Secretary Cheryl Crisp, WSWS journalist and SEP Senate candidate Oscar Grenfell and Sri Lanka SEP National Secretary Deepal Jayasekera the featured speakers. SEP candidatesPeter Byrne, Jason Wardle, Mike Head and John Daviscontributed during the Q&A session.

The livestreamed event, which included detailed graphics, can be viewed in its entirety above.

Opening the meeting, Max Boddy explained that the low combined primary vote of just 68.3 percent for the Liberal-National Coalition and the Labor Party constituted a historic political crisis for Australias ruling elites. Labor won office, he said, but its primary vote dropped to 32.6 percent, another record low for the party, with its vote falling in 85 of Australias 151 electorates.

Millions of workers and young people saw no fundamental difference between Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition and instead voted for the so-called minor parties or independents, Boddy said.

The ongoing decline in support for the establishment parties, the speaker explained, motivated their bi-partisan imposition last year of new election laws that deregistered the SEP and other parties, blocking their party names from appearing on ballot papers.

In the face of these anti-democratic obstacles, the SEP conducted a vigorous and powerful intervention during the short election period, winning 10,723 votes across the three states, Boddy said. We have always said a vote for our party is a conscious one. Never has this been so true as in this election, he added.

SEP National Secretary Cheryl Crisp told the meeting that the world political situation is characterised by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat and referenced Leon Trotskys Transitional Program.

Our meeting has been called to discuss the Australian election but it is not possible to understand this event outside the international situation in which it was held, she said. The worlds population face threats on multiple fronts, she continued, reviewing the disastrous and ongoing COVID pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the danger a global nuclear conflagration, and the surging inflation, food shortages, poverty, hunger and starvation.

The war in Ukraine against Russia, which was planned, devised and orchestrated by the US and NATO, is the working out of long-held perspectives to colonise and subjugate Russia and China to the interests of US imperialism, she said, which will be paid for by a war against workers at home.

Trotskys prediction that mankind faces socialism or barbarism is a very stark and real one today, the speaker said, and emphasised that this crisis could only be resolved by the independent mobilisation of the working class on a revolutionary socialist and internationalist perspective.

The task today, Crisp said, is to turn the developing struggles of the working class, now emerging in every country into a conscious political movement against capitalism.

Deepal Jayasekera, the national secretary of the SEP in Sri Lanka, told the meeting that huge foreign debts, the COVID-19 pandemic, a collapse of the tourist industry, and the war in Ukraine had led to a catastrophic implosion of the islands economy.

This had produced three months of mass anti-government protests and two general strikes demanding resignation of President Rajapakse and his government over skyrocketing prices and shortages of fuel, cooking gas and basic food items and hours-long power outages, he said.

The trade unions are playing a treacherous role in this situation and doing their utmost to defend the government by blocking any independent political and industrial action by the working class. This has allowed the regime to appoint a new prime ministerRanil Wickremasingheto unleash a new round brutal austerity and secure an International Monetary Fund bail-out loan, he explained.

Like our Australian comrades, Jayasekera continued, the SEP is advocating the formation of rank-and-file committeesaction committeesin every workplace, factory, plantation and neighbourhood, independent of the unions, to lead the struggles of the working class for their basic social and democratic rights.

In this way, he concluded, we are taking forward the struggle for a government of workers and peasants committed to socialist policies, as part of the broader struggle for socialism in South Asia and internationally.

SEP Senate candidate Oscar Grenfell, the final speaker, said the SEP was alone in warning during the election that whichever party won government, its program would be dictated by the global breakdown of capitalism, the US confrontations with Russia and China, and the predatory interests of the financial oligarchy. This analysis, he said, has proven completely correct.

The new Labor government, he continued, is a right-wing government that represents the banks, the corporations and the military-intelligence establishments of Australia and the US

Labors pro-business agenda will provoke mass opposition in the working class and pointed to recent strikes by nurses, teachers, aged care staff, bus drivers, and disputes involving many other sections of the working class.

In every instance, these struggles come up against the trade unions, which are not workers organisations in any sense of the term and are responsible for the record low wages and the social crisis that flows from them, he said.

Like other speakers, Grenfell stressed the necessity for workers to break from the trade unions and establish independent rank-and-file committees to defend the wages, jobs and basic rights on the basis of a socialist program. There is no national solution, and there is no short cut The decisive issue is building a socialist leadership of the working class, he said. Concretely, that means joining and building the SEP, which Id urge everyone here to do.

The reports provoked a range of questions from those in attendance and a collection of almost $3,700 donated to the SEPs special election fund. Some of those participating met the SEP during the election campaign and were attending their first party event. Questions were asked and fully answered about quantitative easing and inflation, the minimum wage, the social crisis facing young people, the significance of Trumps January 6 attempted coup for workers in Australia, whether it was possible or necessary to unite the left, and the role of protest groups based on racial identity politics.

Join the SEP campaign against anti-democratic electoral laws!

The working class must have a political voice, which the Australian ruling class is seeking to stifle with this legislation.

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Socialist Equality Party meeting discusses crisis of Australia's two-party system and the way forward for the working class - WSWS

Another day, another anti-market measure from our Conservative Government. Yesterdays White Paper on the private rented sector is another instalment in the familiar story: the Government deserts Conservative principles; the Opposition criticises it for not going far enough; and politics moves further to the Left.

To understand the problem, you have to go back 150 years to Frdric Bastiat, the great French economist yes, there are some and his 1850 essay What is seen and what is not seen. In his parable of the broken window, he notes that if a shopkeeper gets in a glazier to fix a broken window,the glazier is paid and is better off. That is what is seen. But thatdoes not make it logical to smash windows to make glaziers better off.What is not seen is what the shopkeeper might have preferred todowith the money and how that might have been better overall.

So far, so obvious. But this logic is ignored every day in practice by governments and yesterdays White Paper is a good example.

Its centrepiece is to abolish Section 21 that is, no-fault evictions. But there is much more. For example, it will end arbitrary rent review clauses, control who you can rent to, and radically change the existing tenancy system so that tenants have much greater rights to leave when they wish.

These provisions all deal with admitted problems. Sometimes tenants are asked to leave when they dont want to, are required to stay when they would rather not, or must pay more rent when the market requires it.

But these problems dont arise because there are suddenly lots of bad landlords. There are some, but there always were. They arise because our housing market if it can be called a market at all is such a mess, and in particular because there is a huge shortage of housing. We dont build enough houses for the population we have, that population is going up by a million people every three years, and housing is gummed up by a high transaction tax (stamp duty) and property taxes which disincentivise efficient use of what stock there is.

The White Paper deals with the symptoms not these causes, and so will make the problems worse. What is seen, in Bastiats words, is that some tenants will get to keep their tenancies when their landlord wants to end them, and everyone will applaud the Government for its social conscience. What is not seen is that housing supply will decline further, pressure on the housing stock and rents will increase, productivity will continue to fall as people cant get housing where they need it in forms that suit them, and the underlying problems will grow, not decline.

This is inevitable. If you cant be sure you can get your house back, why rent it out? If you dont know youll be able to charge rent to cover the cost, why make improvements? You might think your reasonable circumstances allow you to end a tenancy or increase the rent, but unless the Government ora court agrees, thats tough. And forthose who take the risk anyway, theextra paperwork will make renting less worthwhile. Profits will decline and the quality of the housing stock will follow.

Yes, ending no-fault evictions was inthe manifesto, so the Government has every right to proceed with that, ifnot with everything in the White Paper. But it doesnt make it sensible. The manifesto also promised planning reform and building more houses. Doing that would limit the damage caused by the White Paper. But planning reform has been scrapped, while the rented sector changes go ahead. The result will be higher rents,less choice, and worse conditions for everyone.

This is how collectivism spreads. Wherever there is a problem, instead of dealing with the causes, alleviate the symptoms. Unhappy tenants? Dont try to fix the housing market, but limit rent increases and make evictions impossible instead. Energy prices too high? Dont reform the market just tax and distribute the proceeds to deserving recipients.

Then in turn the new measures produce further unintended consequences, which themselves need fixing, and so the cycle continues. I confidently predict the next step, sooner than you think, will be a ban on leaving houses vacant for more than a few months.

These restrictions on property rights dont just hit productivity and growth. By limiting freedom to choose, they gradually change the kind of society we live in. Every step on this road may seem reasonable in isolation. The measures seem justified, the costs seem limited. But there is only one end to the journey: you dont live in a free society. Instead, you live in one where you cant use your property as you wish, only as government says you can. That is collectivism that is socialism.

Were not as far down the collectivist road as many others in Europe but we are gaining fast. We have to realise we cant buy off the collectivists with a little of what they want. If you pay them Danegeld, they come back for more. The end of that game is oppression and shame, and the nation that plays it is lost.

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The Tory assault on buy-to-let is another step on the road to socialism - The Telegraph

Seventy-five years ago this past spring, on March 12, 1947, US President Harry S. Truman went before a joint session of Congress to request $400 million in military and economic support for the governments of Greece and Turkey.

World War II had ended less than two years earlier. But, unlike his predecessors in the White House after World War I, Truman did not talk about any postwar return to normalcy. He began his remarks on an ominous note, speaking of the gravity of the situation which confronts the world today, as though a new world war were imminent.

The bulk of the short speech that followed is forgotten. Trumans remarks are memorable only for a line that came near the end, when the president announced what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine: I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

With those words, Truman sought to arrogate to the United States the right to intervene all over the world based only on Washingtons own say-so about who free peoples were and were not. In this way, the Truman Doctrine committed the US to the following 75 years of wars, coups, interventions, dictatorships and massive military budgets that continue up to the present, in the proxy war in Ukraine.

In the special dictionary of American foreign policy words mean their opposite. The free people discovered by Truman and the 13 presidents who have followed turn out to comprise a most inglorious list: Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal; Marcos in the Philippines and Suharto in Indonesia; Syngman Rhee in South Korea and Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam; the Shah Pahlavi in Iran and the House of Saud on the Arabian Peninsula; Batista in Cuba and Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti; Mobutu in Zaire and Mubarak in Egypt; the bloody juntas of South America and the apartheid regime of South Africa; the Contras in Nicaragua and Bin Ladens Mujahedeen in Afghanistan; the terrorists of the Al Nusra Front in Syria and the KLA drug cartel in Kosovo. One could go on and on.

The US puppet government in Kiev is just the latest incarnation. It was created in a 2014 CIA-organized coup whose shock troops were fascistsfascists who are now being handed billions of dollars in high-tech killing machines.

Greece has the dubious distinction of being first on the list. There, the right-wing monarchist government of George II was struggling in a civil war against the partisansthe workers and peasants who had done the bulk of the fighting against the Nazi occupiers and fascist collaborators in World War II. The partisan movement was dominated by the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), which, in turn, was dominated by Stalinwho was prepared to betray the country to Britain as part of the sphere of influence he had secretly promised to Churchill in 1944.

Stalins treachery in Greece was predictable. What was demanded of the KKE had already been carried out by its counterparts in Italy and France: the handing over of the working class to the bourgeois government. These actions had been at least as necessary to the postwar stabilization of European capitalism as American arms and money. Stalin ultimately kept his promise, ordering the Greek Communists to submit in 1949.

Yet in 1947 it was still unclear that the Greek Stalinists could contain the aspirations of the massesor for that matter, that the discrediting of the Greek ruling class, which had cooperated with Hitler and Mussolini in World War II and had supported the fascist dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas in the late 1930s, could be overcome. Yugoslav partisans under Tito had taken power just to the north. If the Greek partisans won, all of the Balkans would fall outside of the American world order. This, the Truman administration feared, would make the position of Turkey untenable. In that case the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea, then as now of paramount geostrategic importance, would be lost.

In any case, Great Britain, which was supposed to have been minding the area on behalf of global capitalism, was bankrupt. Indeed, the immediate impetus for Trumans speech was a secret blue paper, delivered by Lord Inverchapel, UK ambassador to the US, informing Secretary of State George Marshall that London could no longer afford to support the monarchists in Greece, and would withdraw its 40,000 soldiers stationed there. Britain also had no capacity to prop up Turkey against Soviet demands for joint control over the straits of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, which for 150 years the Royal Navy had tended as a gate first against the Russian tsars and then against the Soviet Union.

Truman acknowledged British imperialisms terminal decline matter-of-factly. The British Government, which has been helping Greece, can give no further financial or economic aid after March 31, he told Congress. Great Britain finds itself under the necessity of reducing or liquidating its commitments in several parts of the world, including Greece. It is difficult to imagine a more unceremonious end to the British Empire than this, the American president announcing it as if it were the closure of some overextended second-tier bank.

No tears were shed for Britain in the joint session assembled before Truman. After all, Washingtons aim all along had been to supplant the old mother countryto put it on rations, as Trotsky had foreseenand to achieve mastery over all the great powers. Gore Vidals Washington D.C., in its fictional treatment of Franklin Delano Roosevelts last days, captured something of the mood:

The ravaged old President, even as he was dying, continued to pursue the high business of reassembling the fragments of broken empires into a new pattern with himself at center, proud creator of a new imperium. Now, though he was gone, the work remained. The United States was master of the earth. No England, no France, no Germany, no Japan left to dispute the Republics will. Only the mysterious Soviet would survive to act as the other balance in the scale of power.

Roosevelts high business had fallen to Truman, whose elevation to the vice-presidency in 1945 represented a shift to the right within the Roosevelt administration and the Democratic Party. Truman replaced Henry Wallace, who had favored some form of postwar cooperation with the mysterious Soviets. Truman, the Kansas City ward heeler risen through the patronage of the Pendergast political machine, had already expressed his thoughts on cooperation in 1941 after Nazi Germany launched its genocidal invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa. If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible, said Truman, then a second-term senator from Missouri.

Trumans lack of compunction over mass killing was more than rhetorical, as he showed on August 6 and 9, 1945, with the atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atomic attacksstill the only ones in world historyhad no immediate military purpose, though they did give the world an object lesson, as historian Gabriel Jackson pointed out, that a psychologically very normal and democratically elected chief executive could use the weapon just as the Nazi dictator would have used it. In this way, the United Statesfor anyone concerned with moral distinctions in the different types of governmentblurred the difference between fascism and democracy. Truman later said that he never lost sleep over the several hundred thousand Japanese civilians killed.

Coldblooded as his decision was, Truman, in fact, represented the golden mean of American foreign policy thinking in the late 1940s. Well to his right were the generals George Patton and Douglas MacArthur, who agitated for an immediate, direct military confrontation with the Soviet Union, whatever the cost. Truman would later cashier MacArthur for insubordination in the Korean War, when the generals demands for a nuclear attack on China threatened world war, as well as the constitutional principle of civilian control of the military.

The president was no dove, however. His position was close to that of Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who believed, incorrectly, that the Soviet Union was hellbent on world domination. It was Acheson, in fact, who drafted the Truman Doctrine speech. A more moderate position was held by George Kennan, the Russia expert who believed, correctly, that Stalin only wanted reasonable assurances of the Soviet Unions defensive position. Kennan was alarmed by the messianic tone of Trumans speech, as well as its Manichean worldview.

Whatever the tactical differences, all agreed with Time editor Henry Luce that World War II had announced the dawning of an American century in the 20th that would surpass in glory the Pax Britannia of the 19th. Yet in spite of Americas powerful military, its unrivaled industrial production, and the almighty dollar, there never would be a period of hegemony for Washington like that which London enjoyed over the course of the 1800s. This was not because the American ruling class faced a serious challenge from another imperialist power, but because it faced a rival that had not yet concretized itself in the time of the Victorian British bourgeoisie: world socialist revolution.

When the American ruling class first reached out to take the mantle of global hegemony under Woodrow Wilson, with the entry of the US into World War I, it was immediately confronted by the October Russian Revolution, and, simultaneously, by the powerful 1916-1922 American strike wave. Lenin and Trotsky offered a path forward to the oppressed masses, including those in the US, that went far beyond the pious and self-serving pronouncements of Wilsons Fourteen Points, which not even the Allied powers could suffer.

Mr. Wilson bores me with his Fourteen Points, Georges Clemenceau muttered at the Versailles peace conference. Why, God Almighty has only ten! The American ruling class responded to obstinacy from Britain, France and Japan by retreating into isolationism, and to the October Revolution by elevating anti-communism to the status of a quasi-state religion.

Now, in 1947, Truman announced his intention to seize that which Wilson had in his grasp but could not hold. Yet despite its degeneration under Stalin, the Soviet Union still acted as the other balance in the scale of power, as Vidal observed. The planned Soviet economy, though distorted by bureaucracy, had survived the devastation of the Nazi Wehrmacht and was growing strong enough to present American capitalism with a formidable military and technological rival. It was, moreover, productive enough to provide economic and military aid to the nationalist movements of the decolonizing Third World. The economic policies of these movementsnationalization of key industries, import substitution policies, tariffs and the likethreatened the global ambitions of American capitalism. It was against just this sort of nationalism that the US, in accordance with the Truman Doctrine, anointed itself as world policeman and embarked down the path of Cold War.

The bill for aid to Greece and Turkey passed both houses of Congress by wide margins and was signed into law by Truman on May 22, 1947. This was followed on June 5 by the announcement of the Marshall Plan, which provided massive funding to Western Europe, and which laid the groundwork for the integration of the continents economies into a common market. Then, on July 25, Congress passed Trumans National Security Act, which centralized military authority under the National Security Council and created the Central Intelligence Agency, the scaffolding for the permanent military-intelligence deep state.

Within the specific historical context of 1947, Truman was responding as much to developments in the American class struggle as he was to developments in the Balkans and Anatolia. In 1945 and 1946, American workers had launched the largest strike wave in US history. Many of the strikes were wildcats waged in defiance of the official trade unions. This explosive postwar strike wave came within a dozen years of the 1934 citywide strikes in Toledo, San Francisco and Minneapolisthe last of which was led by Trotskyistsand the 1936-1937 sit-down strike movement, which, radiating outward from Detroit, reached near-insurrectionary proportions. The postwar strike wave also came within living memory of 1917.

The Truman administration therefore linked the crusade against communism abroad with an attack on dangerous subversives within the US. Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a Michigan Republican and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had warned Truman in advance of his speech that in order to secure funds for Greece and Turkey he would have to scare the hell out of the American people.

On March 21, 1947, just nine days after he went before Congress to request military aid to Greece, Truman issued Executive Order No. 9835 creating the Employees Loyalty and Security Program, which subjected every federal government worker to loyalty investigations by the Civil Service Commission and the FBI. Any employee could be fired if agents found reasonable grounds of disloyalty, a word the order did not define. Some 3 million workers were investigated. In October 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began to issue its Hollywood subpoenas. Purges in all sectors of American public life followed, culminating in Sen. Joe McCarthy and the Senate hearing witch-hunts of the early 1950s. American intellectual, cultural, and social life has never fully recovered from the anticommunist malignancy.

Three months after launching the purge of federal employees, on June 20, 1947, Truman vetoed the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act. The veto was a cynical maneuver designed to curry favor, in advance of the 1948 presidential election, with the national union federations, the AFL and the CIO, which had condemned Taft-Hartley as a slave labor bill for its outlawing of the closed union shop. Truman knew full well that the veto would be overridden by Congress, which is precisely what happened. After it became law, he invoked it a dozen times in a bid to break strikes he declared a danger to national security.

A crucial provision in Taft-Hartley required union leaders to sign affidavits that they were not members of communist or socialist parties. The CIO, the federation of industrial unions spawned by the great strike wave of the 1930s, used this mechanism to purge 11 affiliated unions containing 1 million membersprecisely those socialist-minded workers who had led the struggles of the Great Depression. Rejecting any connections with socialism, the American unions staked themselves to the profitability of business and the conception that American capitalism would always be dominant, a wager symbolized by the head of the UAW, Walter Reuther, and his Treaty of Detroit with General Motors in 1950, which surrendered working class demands for industrial democracy in exchange for the corporations institutionalization of collective bargainingfor a seat at the table with the executives and politicians.

But American capitalism would not always be dominant. The project of saving world capitalism on the basis of the hegemonic power of one nation could not overcome the contradiction within capitalism between world economy and the nation state. And so, in paradoxical fashion, what was required to maintain the sort of American Century imagined by the Truman Doctrine simultaneously undermined it. While economic rivals, especially West Germany and Japan, emerged from the ashes of World War II, partly with the help of Marshall Plan cash, with the newest technology, Washingtons massive military spending required to defend free peoples everywhere distorted the US economy, left its infrastructure in decay, and contributed to endless outflows of dollars, sustainable owing only to the greenbacks status as the world reserve currencyand ultimately, from the early 1970s onward, by carrying out ever-deeper attacks on the standard of living of American workers.

There is one final issue that connects the Trumans speech 75 years ago to the present: the role of the lie in politics. The Truman Doctrine, as the ideological foundation of American foreign policy, was based on a series of falsehoods: that American imperialism conducts its foreign operations on behalf of freedom and democracy; that socialism is the mortal enemy of the American people; and that American-style capitalism and the free market are the endpoint of history and the best of all possible worlds.

The Truman Doctrine deepened the gap between the American ruling classs invocation of democracy, on the one side, and the ever more violent and intolerable reality for workers in the US and the world over, on the other. That chasm, which separates bourgeois ideology from objective realityand which imparts to official American culture its insufferable phoninesswidened over the ensuing 75 years, which saw countless crimes committed by US imperialism abroad and at home. Now, in the face of the threat of world war, the many millions left to die in the COVID pandemic, global hunger, ecological catastrophe, inflation, the rise of fascism and the blight of mass school shootings, the foundational lies of the American ruling class have reached the point where they can be stretched no further.

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From Greece to Ukraine: 75 years of the Truman Doctrine - WSWS

(AP Photo/John Locher)In this Feb. 19, 2020, photo, Democratic presidential candidates, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., left, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., talk during a Democratic presidential primary debate in Las Vegas, hosted by NBC News and MSNBC.

By Ross Douthat | The New York Times

| June 18, 2022, 4:00 p.m.

There were many bad things about the period in American politics between Donald Trumps escalator descent in summer 2015 and the arrival of the COVID pandemic: chaos, polarization, corruption, hysteria, the usual list.

But one notable good thing about that period was the return of intellectual ferment and policy ambition. Effectively, both Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders demonstrated that more things were possible in American politics than had appeared the case in the dreary mid-Obama era, and populists and socialists rushed to fill the space theyd cleared with ideas for right-wing industrial and family policy, with Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

But you could argue that what really created this new sense of possibility, what helped Trump defeat the Republican establishment and lifted the Sanders campaigns in 2016 and (prepandemic) 2020, was the sense that America had more room to just spend money than the establishment in the Obama era had believed.

When deficits skyrocketed during the Great Recession, not just Tea Partyers but also lots of respectable centrists assumed that there were real inflation and debt-crisis risks on the horizon. In this landscape, Washington became obsessed with fiscal grand bargains, and any kind of policy innovation seemed to require brutal pay-fors: If you wanted new liberal social programs, you needed sweeping tax increases; if you wanted reform-conservative support for work and family, you needed sweeping entitlement reform.

Except that the inflation expectation was wrong, and the U.S. economy chugged along below full capacity. As this became apparent, the green-eyeshade spirit gradually dissolved, and socialism and populism took over for the Simpson-Bowles commission and former Rep. Paul Ryans budgets. The idea of pay-fors didnt go away entirely: One obstacle to the major infrastructure bill that Trump promised and never delivered was congressional Republicans posturing as deficit hawks, and Sanders famously feuded with Sen. Elizabeth Warren over how to pay for their overlapping Medicare proposals. But mostly Republicans returned to a deficits-dont-matter insouciance, while the left had its own intellectual apparatus, modern monetary theory, to justify spending to the moon.

In certain ways the policy response to the pandemic was the apotheosis of this trend: bipartisan spending bills, extraordinary spending levels, negligible concern about the deficit. But today the COVID relief bills look like an endpoint as well as a peak. In effect, the temporary crisis spending filled in all the fiscal space that policy entrepreneurs had envisioned being filled by permanent commitments. We saved businesses and propped up (and then some) state and local governments; we didnt institute Medicare for All or a permanent expansion of the child tax credit.

And then, at last, inflation made a comeback and just like that, the era of free-lunch policymaking came to an end.

That end may not be permanent; we dont know yet what the inflation rate or the economy will look like in 2024. But right now it feels as if both ambitious socialists and creative populists had a window of opportunity for unconstrained policymaking that opened in the mid-2010s, lasted through the Trump presidency and slammed closed under Joe Biden.

An atmosphere of constraint does not preclude all legislative creativity. There are certain things that Democrats can fund just by raising taxes on the rich, for instance, and perhaps some version of Build Back Better that balances new spending with upper-bracket tax hikes can still emerge from the long courtship of Sen. Joe Manchin. Among Republicans, Sen. Mitt Romneys family-benefit proposal pays for itself with reforms to the welfare state and the tax code; presumably other ideas from the populist right could do the same.

But given Americas existing fiscal commitments, the return of inflation deals a real blow to grand ambitions on the left, because there are few signs that the median voter (or the typical wealthy Democratic donor) is prepared to accept tax increases on the scale required to pay for the full Sanders or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez an agenda. It also creates substantial problems for politicians trying to hold together a downscale-upscale coalition on the right. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for instance, has flourished by attacking wokeness in schools while also raising teacher salaries, but its hard to imagine his donors would be enthusiastic about a similar approach nationally if it required higher taxes on the rich.

This doesnt mean that either populism or socialism is about to disappear. As Patrick Brown writes in Politico, with the ebbing of libertarian and corporate influence on the party, Republicans seeking a working-class conservatism have a more open ideological field for their ambitions than in the past. And theres a similar dynamic among Democrats, where the key inflation hawks in the Biden era have been gadflies like Manchin and former Treasury secretary Larry Summers, with the core of the party, relative to the Obama era, standing way off to the left.

But fiscal conditions, the inflation rate and donor pressure still matter, no matter which ideological faction has the upper hand. And there are a lot of ways for ideology to manifest itself, some of them requiring less fiscal space than others. What happened on the left after Sanders lost to Biden and the George Floyd protests took off in 2020, the dramatic shift from economic to cultural revolution, offers a case study in how radical energy gets redirected into culture war when its economic ambitions seem blocked off.

The right has long experience with this kind of redirection, and ample enthusiasm for cultural conflict. So expect more of it, from both sides, under conditions of fiscal constraint. And expect a slow-dawning realization among the serious-minded socialists and populists that the best time to carry out their big ideas, the best moment for a radical policy departure, may have already come and gone.

Ross Douthat | The New York Times(CREDIT: Josh Haner/The New York Times)

Ross Douthat is a columnist for The New York Times.

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Ross Douthat: Inflation is closing the doors that Trump and Sanders opened - Salt Lake Tribune